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Slackware, Oldest Linux Distro Still In Active Development, Turns 24
sombragris writes: July 17 marked the 24th anniversary of Slackware Linux, the oldest GNU/Linux still in active development, being created in 1993 by Patrick Volkerding, who still serves as its BDFL. Version 14.2 was launched last year, and the development version (Slackware-current) currently offers kernel 4.9.38, gcc 7.1, glibc 2.25, mesa 17.1.5, and KDE and Xfce as official desktops, with many others available as 3rd party packages. Slackware is also among the Linux distributions which have not adopted systemd as its init system; instead, it uses a modified BSD init which is quite simple and effective. Slackware is known to be a solid, stable and fast setup, with easy defaults which is appreciated by many Linux users worldwide. Phoronix has a small writeup noting the anniversary and there's also a nice reddit thread.
Praise Bob.
Wow
I started my Linux adventures on Slackware back in 1998.
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
I made a nice post about it. It is truly the best linux there is. Leave all that Voodoontu outside.
If Slackware is a millennial, does it mean it only has 5-6 seconds of attention span for ads?
You can't handle the truth.
Tracker announce: transamrit.net: error.
FWIW, other torrents are working.
Yes, I know this isn't tech support.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I think it used to come on CD either in magazines or by mail back when downloading wasn't always the most feasible option.
I've been using Slackware since before Slackware 96 (a Windows 95 joke, you see, and my memory is dim, but I seem to recall that there was once some semi-serious questions on which one would be released first) and I haven't yet found anything I wanted to do that I couldn't do in Slackware.
Mythtv backends? Slackware. Frontends? Slackware. Webserver? File server? Mail server? DNS server? All Slackware. iptables/ebtables bridge/router/firewall/VPN abomination? Slackware, baby!
Runs great on my litebook too. In fact, not counting my Pis and other appliances, the only linux box I have that isn't Slackware and probably won't ever become Slackware is my CNC controller - and that is because EMC comes as an installable/live ISO.
My personal favorite was setting up iSCSI targets. The examples and documentation are all written for enterprise distros, but they just wouldn't work. Load slackware, write a couple of slackbuild files, fire up the compiler and BAM! $10,000 in hardware outperforms the dedicated SAN boxes other people are spending 6 digits on. Hell, I think I paid less for my entire DRBD bulk slave than some of the quotes that I got for annual maintenance on commercial SAN "solutions".
Oh, and if I recall correctly, Patrick is one of the handful of other 4-digit UIDs still active here. I haven't talked to him in a while. If he is still in MN, I should make a point of getting up to his remote part of the state to buy him a beer.
See that "Preview" button?
I started with slackware 2.3 some time in the mid 90's. I used it for a good 10 years.
A link to a four day old reddit thread. So useful.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I started on Slackware back in the 90s, left for a while after going to DeadRat then Suse but came back after getting sick of things Just Not Working with the aformentioned "professional" distros. So I thought what the hell, installed slackware 13.0 on my laptop, everything worked (and I mean everything, even the wifi and printer out the box with minimal configuration) and I've stuck with it since. And now with systemd taking over most other distros I have no plans on changing.
Thumbs up to Patrick, good work, keep it up!
Slackware is the ideal expression of Unix's "sharp pointy tools". Nothing unnecessary, everything as simple as needed to do it's job. It is the anti-Windows instead of trying to become Windows. The rap about difficulty comes from people who don't appreciate transparent, well organized access to everything an OS does down to its core.
Slackware was the first Linux variant I used full time when I abandoned Windows dual booting. I can only remember good things about it. Absolutely solid, easy to administer, simple, and logical. It wouldn't suit everyone, being a little less targeted at new users, although it was definitely fine for any moderately competent user. I really ought to give the new version a chance next time it comes to a disk swap. Many thanks to its maintainer for all his hard work.
I remember being in grad school around 1994 and hearing about a version of unix for the pc Downloaded the images using the schools network and ended up with a considerable stack of floppies. I cant remember how many exactly but had to be at least 20. . Installing was and adventure but it was amazing to be running "unix" on my home pc.
Slackware was the first serious distro for me.
I also remember using ZIPSLACK, which booted it via SYSLINUX from a DOS prompt, saved in a normal FAT partition, if I remember correctly. It was the first real "how to use Linux without trashing your partitions or using a boot disk" version.
I remember spending a lot of time on Slack 3.9 which contained just the right versions of GCC and kernel to compile for Freesco (a single floppy router distro that's still around).
For many years, I ran it as my only desktop (8.0 - 13.0 or thereabouts) and - when hardware has failed and I've been forced onto older machines - I've installed Slackware in preference to get as much done as I can on the creaky hardware.
I ran servers on it for all kinds of purposes and in all sorts of places.
Then, I admit, I had to move to Ubuntu when deploying desktops, just for the ease of use. And now, in the virtual machine era, I have a weird switch where - instead of Slack on servers and Ubuntu LTS on clients - I do the reverse. Which gives me one-command app installation with dependencies on servers (who cares what GUI is used), but Slack lets me choose how my personal system works and exactly when and makes it predictable and configurable.
Slackware gave me a lot. From my first glimpses at a real OS that I'd heard only in myth and legend, to the knowledge that you could run machines within machines even before virtualisation was readily available, to my first real exposure to serious programming and working on open-source projects, to a career in deploying boxes equivalent to the more expensive commercial offerings, to running all the backends of my professional setups, to providing me with a free and powerful desktop when I had no money, to giving me control over my server estate and running inside Windows servers to do the things they just can't do as efficiently.
At one point or another, Slackware has shown me everything about a computer that I find interesting and intriguing, which Windows has never managed. DOS and Windows were always a case of spending time trying to get the best out them through guesswork and hope and closed tools (see the EMM386, etc. conversation in the Reddit thread!). Slackware showed me that you can look into the system and change anything you like, because that's exactly how it got made, and everything became understandable, predictable, and Slackware was chosen on merit out of THOUSANDS of other distros that all used the same code (which to me, shows just how good it is - anyone could copy Slackware's entire codebase, and many have, but Slackware is still going).
And then some fuckhead made systemd and all the other modern shite. And still Slackware is out there, competing without even trying.
If I was sent on a mission out of the solar system, where it was just me and a bunch of machines around me to keep me alive, I'd be insisting it all ran Slackware. And taking a bunch of Slackware CDs with me.
I went to Slackware out of frustration trying to get Linux to run on a laptop. It worked on the first boot. One thing I love about Slack compared to Ubuntu is Slack never tried to fuck up my config files when I updated software.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I had read about UNIX, had a fascination with it from the start of the 90s, first got to see it for real when I started university in 1995, and Slackware 3.0 appeared on the PCW April 1996 issue. (I think it was this issue and version: google isn't much help here, and neither is the rest of the web.)
Took me a week to work out rm deletes files. My usual solution to finding myself in vi was exiting via ctrl-z followed by jobs -l followed by kill -9. Until I'd learned rm and mv, if I created problems by creating a file, I'd reinstall. I figure out many things I could type by reinstalling and watching the package names. Learned the basics of TeX via a gentle introduction document, and basically taught myself by reverse engineering the gobbledigook one found in .sty packages. (I found out rm via a hint inferred from the openlook file manager asking 'do you want to remove this file', rather than 'delete' or 'erase', which were the two synonyms I knew from DOS. At first, the only UNIX command I knew was ls, since the UNIX column in PCW mentioned it somewhere. cd worked the same way as DOS, and from DOS I recalled that md and mkdir were synonyms, so tried md and mkdir and found the latter worked.)
In those days there were no online howtos (or at least, no easy way to even know such things existed, and no easy way to find out about ways to find stuff -- these were the days when some industry commentators were suggesting that Microsoft Network would make the internet obsolete :-)) ).
John_Chalisque
I remember downloading Slackware onto 5.25 floppies on a 2400 baud modem. It took forever, but it was worth it. I liked it better than SLS.
I picked up Slackware 3.0 in late 1995, and happily got it to install on my home-assembled desktop. Once installed I didn't have a clue what to do with it, but it wasn't from Redmond, and that was a major victory. I tried many other distros over the years, Slackware opened a big door I didn't really know existed at the time.
Happy Birthday Slackware!
I first used Slackware for a college/university's computer science course for ANSI C programming in (19)95/96. I used it in its computer lab and remotely with a shell account.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Slackware was my first linux distro and still one of my favorites today. My first install of it was Slackware 3.5 off a cd I found in the back flag of "The Linux Network" by Fred Butzen and Chris Hilton. Along with a printed version of the slackware online guide I was set.
I loved that I could setup all these different network services and I loved the security aspect of it all. Messing with the firewall settings, running various services such as httpd, ftp, bind and a print server.
The fact it was all free and I could tinker to my hearts content was amazing. I loved how straight forward slack felt. All I had to do was read a text file and edit things. So much easier then mucking around with programs that were suppose to configure the file but just failed to do so.
This is still true in a lot of linux. Sure we have auto config and it usually works, but when you have to get down and dirty, you can.
I never completely left the Windows world unfortunately, but I think I'll be forced to when Windows 7 stops getting updates.
Between slack, ubuntu and my raspberry pi setups, I'm almost wanting Windows 7 to truly get a real EOL just to push me. It helps that a lot more of my games will run on linux with natively or with wine then they did ten years ago. Of course, most of the games I play are at least ten years old anyway.
Go Slackware!!!
My first experience playing with Linux was a Slackware distro based on the 0.9 kernel. It had to have been 23-24 years ago, so it may have been the first release.
Roughly the same timeframe, I got my hands on a copy of Solaris X86. Used that to ftp to wustl.edu in order to download Peter Tattum's Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.1.
In an age where everything else is off fiddling with systemd, moving around config files and installing software and support wherever they feel like, Slackware still looks, thinks and behaves like it's a Unix...
The installer hasn't substantially changed in 20 years, and looks/feels more like the FreeBSD install than anything else, and package management is more akin to the BSDs than anything else.
For someone like me that uses Linux because it's Unix-y and not just an alternative to Windows, the fact that Slackware retains these qualities is of great comfort and reminds me that all these fads of deviation from the Unix way will pass...